Province of B.C, Canada forges ahead with OpenData initiatives

This week a special Open Data Summit took place in Vancouver, B.C where about 120 government folk and stakeholders took part in the discussion around the topic of OpenGov and Open Data. In a report from the event, it was good to see that the topic of standards was quite important and discussed from the get go, also citing the success of the Google open transit feed data spec in helping to open and share data with the public – a nice summary of the event can be found on this blog. To follow up, a number of local communities are hosting open data events and hackathons this week-end – these as part of the International Open data Day http://opendataday.org/. Of note, the city of Victoria have just released new OpenData Catalog and the Province of BC has redesigned their OpenData resource at http://www.data.gov.bc.ca/.